Tuesday, July 08, 2008

June 27, 2008: Rep. John Lewis Sponsors Bill to Honor Sacrifice of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner

On Monday, Rep. John Lewis introduced H. Res. 1293 to commemorate of the 44th anniversary of the deaths of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner who were murdered during the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964. The effort was a nationwide call for volunteers to help register black voters in Mississippi.

The brutal murders drew the nation’s attention to the violent resistance of Southern segregationists and provoked an outpouring of support for the Freedom Summer campaign and the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. Despite the widespread attention received by the case, no one was convicted for the murders for more than forty years. In 2005, on the day they disappeared more than 40 years later, Edgar Ray Killen, a leader of the local Klu Klux Klan group responsible for the deaths, was convicted of those crimes.